Mac Word 6.0 – Shipping a crappy product is a lot like beating your head against the wall. It really does feel good when you ship a great product as a follow-up, and it really does motivate you to spend some time trying to figure out how not to ship a crappy product again. Mac Word 6.0 was a crappy product. And, we spent some time trying to figure out how not to do that again. In the process, we learned a few things, not the least of which was the meaning of the term Mac-like.
[ “(extlink)Buggin’ My Life Away”:http://weblogs.asp.net/Rick_Schaut/ ]
A neat review of why Word 6 failed from the Developer’s point of view. It’s always interesting to see why decisions made for good reasons can unintentionally “kill the golden goose.”
bq. While Jeff Raikes thought the Pyramid project as a good idea, Chris Peters looked at the Word Perfect problem and decided that Pyramid was a bad way to solve the feature parity problem. A complete code rewrite is risky. The whole point of a complete rewrite is to take a few steps backward in the short-run in order to be able to make some greater strides in the long-run. Chris Peters decided that we couldn’t afford to take the short-run hit that Pyramid required.
Re-factoring code is something programmers love, and business managers seem to hate. I guess it’s a fundamental distinction. Programmers see the potential benefits later on. Business managers see the additional work, lost time and advantage over competitors.
In the end though, it’s hard to argue that the business types might be right. Complete re-writes (Netscape’s Gecko, Apple’s Copland, etc.) have a pretty shaky record.
Why MSWord6:Mac Was Bad
Tags: age · ANT · apple · blog · bug · business · chris · ci · it · mac · problem · project · review · ui · web · Work
Mac Word 6.0 – [ “(extlink)Buggin’ My Life Away”:http://weblogs.asp.net/Rick_Schaut/ ]
A neat review of why Word 6 failed from the Developer’s point of view. It’s always interesting to see why decisions made for good reasons can unintentionally “kill the golden goose.”
bq. While Jeff Raikes thought the Pyramid project as a good idea, Chris Peters looked at the Word Perfect problem and decided that Pyramid was a bad way to solve the feature parity problem. A complete code rewrite is risky. The whole point of a complete rewrite is to take a few steps backward in the short-run in order to be able to make some greater strides in the long-run. Chris Peters decided that we couldn’t afford to take the short-run hit that Pyramid required.
Re-factoring code is something programmers love, and business managers seem to hate. I guess it’s a fundamental distinction. Programmers see the potential benefits later on. Business managers see the additional work, lost time and advantage over competitors.
In the end though, it’s hard to argue that the business types might be right. Complete re-writes (Netscape’s Gecko, Apple’s Copland, etc.) have a pretty shaky record.